No. 12 - Leo Butnaru

A Bertrand Russell with a Wagnerian Twist

Pupa russa (Humanitas, 2004), (Art, 2007)

Gheorghe
Craciun’s(1)
novel cannot
be the simple tale of one woman’s misfortunes. Its driving impulse must
be something other than compassion for the fate of a “victim of
society.” Pupa
russa
is—only superficially—a realist novel that shows how Leontina
Guran, a “typical” girl from an ordinary village, is gradually
drained of humanity by the direct and insidious pressures of the
Communist regime. But it is more than that, of course.

In childhood, the
little girl and her playmates come across an abandoned parachute.
They bury their find so that they can keep it for themselves. Only,
its discovery by the village policeman unleashes a brutal
investigation in which mysterious figures “from the district”
take part. Later, with a basketball team in the West, Leontina toys
with the idea of defecting. “The System” finds her out, again,
and she is blackmailed into becoming an informer under threat of
expulsion from the Institute for Physical Education and Sports.
(IEFS).

The action moves
from threats to ordeals. Destiny (or the force that replaces it in
Ceauşescu’s Romania) offers Leontina a post as “coordination
coordinator” –an instructor in a district apparatus of the Union
of Communist Youth. It soon becomes clear that her main task is to
attend to the sexual gratification of the entirely male upper echelon
of the institution for which she works.

There are enough
elements to see the book as “the story of a woman” whose fate
symbolizes the essential inhumanity of communism. Profound,
subtle, an interdisciplinary thinker, Craciun stands as one of
Romania’s major humanist intellectuals of recent decades,
and anyone who has followed his
reflections on literature cannot seriously believe that this is the
only issue in the novel.

Craciun’s
approach actually involves an emphasis on determinants,
with the same insistence one finds in his explicit model, Flaubert’sMadame
Bovary,
a novel that aimed to study the psychology of an individual and the
psychology of a milieu simultaneously. Like the French master, whose
background presence makes itself felt more than once in Pupa
russa,Craciun
manages to combine an acute sociological and biological perception of
the human condition with the hieratic beauty of contemplation—with
a constant and patient refinement of all the details. This might
suggest a Flaubertian reconciliation of “naturalism” with
“aestheticism.” But the synthesis is reworked in a quite
different social and intellectual epoch, and this alters its
structure and significance, both.

Craciun
does intend to offer us a “human type,” but in doing so he never
for one moment tries to create the “illusion of life.” Unlike
Emma Bovary, Leontina Guran is from the outset a hypothetical
character.
The marks of her virtuality are not concealed beneath the lacework of
“notation” that creates an “atmosphere” and a “flesh and
blood” character. It seems to me that Craciun
employs a subtle, paradoxical mode of presentation which suggests
that the woman in question is not the result of direct observation
from life but of probabilistic calculation. We are not meant to
imagine her as flowing from the realist technique of a Courbet, to
invoke one of Flaubert’s contemporaries. She springs from something
like the visual paradox and mathematical rigor that spawned M. C.
Escher’s hollow, spiraling female figures.

Leontina Guran is
deliberately conceived as a statistical
fiction;
her fate is the equivalent of a theoretical model. Through an
artifice that breaks the classical confines of “realism” and
“verisimilitude,” it combines determinations, situations and
forms of social habitus [to use a sociological term] that are
generally felt as typicalof
the everyday vexations of life under communism. Craciun
constructs a robot portrait, in a sense, by giving prominence to the
lines of force and collective attitudes and fantasies by virtue of
which a character with certain personal and biographical features is
considered representative. Leontina Guran is not typical in the sense
commonly used of characters in Balzac or even Flaubert but rather in
the analytic and scientific sense of the “ideal type” familiar
from the sociological method of Max Weber.

In the manner of
researchers who try to simulate the structure of complexity
in digital models,Craciun
may be seen as introducing an ever larger number of parameters to
configure the behavior of his experimental subject. This presupposes,
first of all, a set of sociological determinants: a rural community
affected by various forms of decomposition and corroded by communist
collectivization, but also by a Zeitgeist that favors the loosening
of traditional moral prohibitions. Moreover, Leontina’s misfortunes
begin within the family itself, when a greedy uncle tries to take
advantage of her innocence: a stock situation deeply rooted in an
imaginative system that the popular press has been molding for the
last decade and a half.2

Leontina then
becomes subject to an educational system that appears as a mechanism
for the inculcation of docility--or of duplicity carried to the point
of perversion. Beneath the opaque dome of an education in “socialist
ethics and equitableness,” the girls’ hostel at which the newly
urbanized Leontina resides during her time at school becomes the
scene of secret Sapphic rituals. At this point, the author skillfully
“simulates” the tendency of the popular mind to conflate moral
and sexual corruption. Leontina’s real education is “subterranean:”
it takes place not in classrooms but in the austere, insalubrious
hostel we are encouraged to identify with the prison world outside.
Depending not only on the ‘System’ but also on the group’s
internal hierarchy, the “hostel”3,
like the world, rests on a paradoxical, improbable interpenetration
of control and repression—and complete sexual anomie. Thus, the
girls’ school orgies have the coherence of a tendency in the
collective imaginary—not so much the one that has to do with the
grammar of “forbidden pleasures” as the one that regards coercive
institutions as schools for vice rather than virtue.

It is clear that
Leontina’s adult evolution is also intentionally yoked to a set of
negative social stereotypes. The outlines of her character take shape
in accordance with the popular allergy to communist talk of
“promoting women to positions of responsibility.” Much as the
virtual super-heroines of computer games came into being to express
the yearning for emancipation among young Western women, so Leontina
is preceded by an abstract model of “demand.” Only, the abstract
model was routinely demonized in the popular imagination where it
materialized as “the Party whore,” a character always present in
the panoply that codes the society of the old regime in the popular
imagination. With a discreet but lethal irony, Craciun
allows his heroine’s fate to be decided as if by impersonal forces,
by the inertia and mechanical determination of “the history of
mentalities:” an athletic sensual woman with a keen sense of
independence is necessarily a “whore,” therefore an “informer,”
therefore covetous and artful, therefore willing to prostitute
herself for a cushy place in the Party’s propaganda apparatus –
but also, it becomes clear, sufficiently unintelligent to sell
herself for rather trifling privileges.

In this connection
it is useful to consider the title of the novel. The term Pupa
russa
has puzzled many readers: some argue that, as the chapter headings
are in Latin, the author invented a Latin equivalent for something
that evidently did not exist in the Roman world: a “Russian doll.”
However, assuming that Craciun
did not resort to the lexicons of the Vatican (where Latin is the
official language), it is more likely that we are dealing here with
modern Italian. In view of Leontina’s role, this may be meant to
evoke the mentality of the first waves of foreign tourists in
Romania, mostly young Italian men, at a time when the morals of local
girls eager to establish good relations with our Latin cousins were
automatically assumed to be “easy.”

Beyond this
linguistic riddle, what interests us is the rich and ambiguous
symbolism of the “doll.” The Italian form in which it appears,pupa,
suggests a kind of muted tenderness, which in the actual text the
author very rarely allows to break through in relation to the main
character. It is also a Russian
doll – which implies interplay between container and contained that
may be mentally prolonged either into a kind of ultimate secret
essence or into sheer nothingness.

Evidently,
however, “doll” is also associated with a symbolism of absolute
passivity: a doll bears the surface marks of humanity but reveals
itself to be an inert object, good only to serve as scapegoat or
lightning rod for the people’s fury and frustration, for the dark
instincts of the “community.” Craciun’s Leontina is something
like a crash test dummy—one of those tow-stuffed mannequins that
suggest not merely the form but also the density
of the human body—the ones they belt into the driver’s seat and
project, full force, at a wall.

Decoding this allegory, I would say
the following:

A) The “automobile” represents the
collective attitudes and fantasies, diffuse yet insidious and
ubiquitous, on which her existence “skids.” Always desired, in
various forms, and therefore encouraged, tempted, seduced, allured,
Leontina is met with the most biting contempt as soon as she
surrenders to the passions or interests of others. It is a question
here of the archaic mechanisms of folkloric masculinity, which in a
faultily modernized society operate in the void, as the mechanisms of
crude, blind troglodytism. Leontina is the one who reveals the
grotesque fantasies of the men around her: “May she not be killed,
may her teeth not be pulled one by one, may her fingernails not be
torn out, her breasts cut off with a razor, her stomach ripped open
with a saw. May she not be smothered with a towel, strangled with a
clothes line, telephone cord or electric wiring. No. [Note:all these negatives,
contained in speech that might be either Leontina’s whispered
forebodings or the dull roar of a collective subconscious, could not
be more ambiguous, as their point is to underline, not to dispel, the
respective threats.] But
let them hurl themselves on her back like stallions, jump in front of
her like foul-breathing satyrs, take her ankles in the palms of their
hands, raise her legs to violate her womb with their greasy hairy
bellies.” (p. 214).

B) The “wall” that the automobile
hits in the imaginary experiment is the ideal
functional equivalent of the totalitarian system, the theoretical
model of perfect coercion – the dark, dystopian fantasy Orwell
tracked in 1984.
Leontina’s head, like a rubber doll’s, is from her earliest
classes subject to a drastic moulding process: “you must love your
country, […] you must do everything, that is, love your house
garden trowel spade wells peaks mountains rivers and dams mines and
furnaces hammer and sickle firs and cornfields. You must love your
granny because she too is your country. You must love your manuals
and exercise books and your red Pioneer scarf, which are also your
country. Sergeant Ioviţă, who raps you on the hand with his stick,
is your country – and so too is the comrade teacher who puts you in
the corner because you were naughty, or the Soviet soldier Matrosov
who fights bare-chested to free you from enemies. […] The word MUST
is part of the word tank, part of the word war, part of the word
soldier, part of the word child. The word MUST is a scourge of
punitive fire that rains down on everyone’s head” (p. 140).

If we put together A) and B), we get
a picture of the profound
stability, the long
duration of “real”
socialism. For Gheorghe Craciun,
the carnivalesque imaginary that overturns the values of the official
ideology is not truly subversive but represents an essential
component of the Soviet-style social gel. In the model constructed inPupa
russa,
the anarchic and orgiastic popular imaginary merges with fantasies ofphysical
possession intrinsic in the communist passion for rationalization and
organization. This union of opposites – the true secret of the
“discreet charm of real socialism” – is subtly and powerfully
expressed in the passages of rhymed prose that tell the story of
Leontina’s life. Each time the political era changes, Craciun
draws another curtain of words in which he intersperses the slogans
of “the new stage of socialist construction” with the truculent
ambiguities of popular humor. It is as if the firmly and
energetically cubist mosaics on the walls of steel or tractor plants
were being hijacked towards the curved lines of caricature; as if the
“militant” frescoes of Orozco Ribera were being filtered through
Goya’s Caprices.
The effect goes beyond comedy or bitter irony: the rhymed prose of
these linking passages suggests a monstrous monumentality, in which
the corpse of utopian communism is constantly fuelled by a genuinely
vital but hidden, blind frenzy.

Monumentality
is key to Gheorghe Craciun’s approach: The intermezzosof
rhymed prose create the sense of a vast moving panorama of
Ceauşescu’s Romania. The speeding up of the film that turns the
delirious propaganda into comedy does not remove this sense ofvastness
and massiveness.
The verse chronicles evoke Eisestein’s cinema which, even crossed
with Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, maintains its vocation for
grandiose mass movement. But, with such a colossal backdrop, the
character in the foreground is automatically projected toward the
stars. He or she becomes, as the Americans say, “larger than life.”
To put it plainly, then, Leontina Guran is constructed as a symbolic
character of monumental stature.
I cannot help seeing her as a kind of negative response—demonic or
demonized and surrounded by an aura of vacuity—to the plenary
paradisiacal “giant woman” in Mircea Eliade’s prose.

In a way, Leontina
resembles Swift’s Gulliver held captive by the Lilliputians. This
affinity with Gulliver and the philosophical literature of the
eighteenth century comes from the impression that Leontina gives of
being a “theoretical character.” Writing as he did at a time when
the various experiments in realism had been left behind, Craciun
never entertained the illusion of “reflecting reality.” The
diffuse yet constant monumentality of his main character appears to
exhibit the mental mechanism of exponentiality itself—with an
insistence that conveys the author’s own self-awareness. Leontina’s
grandeur does not stem from the inner meaning of her actions, nor
from their conformity to an absolute standard, but rather from the
dionysiac orgy of the statistical
imaginary.
In this writing, representation amounts to the human need to project
a plausible, probabilistic order onto the incoherence of experience.

For this reason,
the “situations” in which Leontina is “placed” do not have a
“naturalist” consistency. First of all, the illusion of movement
is excluded from them. Although marks of the sensational epic are not
lacking, the scenes are actually suspended: they involve something
like frozen thought experiments, whose texture is deliberately
rarefied so that their sociological parameters are visible. Craciun’s
achievement is to make this suggestion of theoretical modeling glide
over into the suggestion of a hieratic art, the art of the
stained-glass window. The analytic attitude of a “projector of
fantasies” is constantly converted/subverted into aesthetic
contemplation. A perpetuum
mobile
of mutual opposites establishes itself between the lucid
social-cultural coordinates of the “Leontina hypothesis” and the
(Platonistic, Petrarchian) imaginary of pure contours.

Gheorghe Craciun
deconstructs the “naturalist” illusion by abandoningthe
character’s “inner life.” He doesn’t play back Leontina’s
thoughts. The motives for her behavior—her dilemmas, deliberations,
crises of conscience—do not appear, or they are reduced to the
minimum required by intelligible narrative. In this dimension,
Leontina is an essentially mute
character, and this muteness accentuates her statuary
(and by implication) monumental
condition. Overwhelming development of foreground sense-perceptions
deepens her “mystery”—obtained, paradoxically, by a method that
involves abstract, “theoretical” clarity. Faithful to his
preoccupations in analytic philosophy, Craciun shapes his principal
character by alternating between purely logical cognitive models of
the representation of reality and perceptual impressions that he
reproduces with the greatest attention and delicacy.

As if lost in the
approximations of an infinitesimal calculus, Craciun replaces
Leontina’s “stream of consciousness” with scrupulously
recorded/projected sensations: “Sand-lime in the eyes. The smell of
ageing skin. Rough curled-mint tea. Clear cherry-plum honey. Heated
margarine. Melted butter. Fire lighted with fir-tree chips” (p.
146). From simple “notation technique” (or the Sekundenstil
of German naturalists around the turn of the twentieth century),
Craciun arrives at minutely detailed symphonic displays that make one
think of Bertrand Russell practising Wagnerian breathing exercises.
The reader is often overwhelmed by this expansion of “immediacy,”
whose effect is similar to that of three-dimensional films in which
you feel that the image is leaving the screen and landing in your
lap.

Another
association from which I cannot refrain – although it is probably
too personal and therefore eccentric for its spirit to be really
communicated – is to Peter Jackson’s filmic versions of J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings.
Let us be clear: I am speaking not of Tolkien’s text, which is
actually rather arid in terms of perceptible detail, but of the
screen adaptations of his trilogy, which are based precisely on the
remedying of that defect. Jackson’s films come alive through the
power and credibility of the details, which resonate with the
“supernatural” background. Something analogous occurs in Pupa
russa:
the clarity of the bodily perceptions reacts in a strangely
captivating manner with the “improbable” and, at the same time,
“artificial-theoretical” and “symbolic-fantastic”
monumentality of the central character.

Northrop Frye
fascinated Craciun’s generation.4
A Protestant minister intrigued with the archetypal, Frye was
convinced that the history of the Western epos involved the constant
degradation of the character. In classical antiquity, the central
figure came on stage as a god, or as a hero who represented the
sublime side of the human condition. In modern literature, the
protagonist has a tendency to become subhuman—irony reduces him to
a hopeless puppet. But Frye further speculates that, at the lowest
point in the process, when the character has plumbed the depths of
“degradation,” there appears a tendency to repeat the cycle. In
other words, the art of the absurd begins to acquire ritual nuances,
and the subhuman puppet tends to be set up as a divinity.

In my view Pupa
russa
is a novel constructed in accordance with this theory—which in
itself amounts to a vision. Up to a point, Leontina Guran is a
provocatively negative counterpart of both the great Cucuteni
fertility goddess and of the “emancipatory myths of the eternal
feminine” that dominated popular imagery during the heroic epoch of
Romanian modernization (see Constantin Rosenthal’s paintingRevolutionary
Romania).
Thus, if Leontina is the incarnation or apotheosis of the Great
Failure, nevertheless, something akin to hope—or a will to
hope—seems to survive in her beyond all reason at a somatic level
in an almost unconscious form. Her eventual murder, by an unknown and
therefore impersonal agency, verges on ritual sacrifice, and (in the
archetypal paradigm) it points to regenerative forces that may be
released in the collective imaginary. Leontina’s death, in other
words, belongs to the monumental dimension of her character. She
becomes an object of exorcism, a scapegoat. At the level of
suggestion, the sacrifice seems to relate to the collective will of
Romanian society as
it emerged from communism:
a will to forget its own deep essential cowardice, a drive to repress
any awareness of its own guilt and moral wretchedness. But, of
course, that’s not all. The symbolism of death generates an almost
automatic symbolism of resurrection. On this plane, the Leontina
character conveys the blind courage of existing or surviving under
any conditions, despite
any conditions.

In
the end, Craciun compels us to reflect on what myth
means for us today, here, now—and beyond official clichés. To
propose a definition conditioned by the Romanian experience and these
pages: myth is a sociological chimera to which an intense awareness
of what we cannot understand about the Other and ourselves attaches,
or around which that awareness forms like a cloud of rain. The myth’s
contours are carefully drawn through approximations of experimental,
statistical reason, and from it a certain plentitude of nothingness
beams forth. The essence of the myth is its prescriptive power.

Starting at this
point, I think, Gheorghe Craciun assumes Gustave Flaubert’s
celebrated confession:Madame
Bovary, c’est moi—
“Leontina
sint eu”—I
am Leontina. Neither Emma Bovary nor Leontina Guran is her author
because she was born of his empathetic labors. Nor is the female
character a mask behind which the male writer discloses the most
sensitive parts of himself. These female characters “are” their
authors to the extent that they symbolically project what their
authors have not managed to understand about themselves. They are
their authors because they express items from the depths of
consciousness: existential anxiety, uncertainty about one’s own
identity, sharp lucidity regarding the limits of human understanding
and empathy, but also an irrepressible impulse to pass beyond those
limits. It would seem that nothing is to a greater degree “myself”
than my own doubt and questioning, my own relation of
attraction-repulsion to or with myself.

2
One might ponder that the novel is in a way
constructed retrospectively, through the displacement of certain
contemporary representatives of moral turpitude on to the history of
the communist period. In fact, the sociological insight on which
Craciun bases
himself is that the popular press that appeared with a bang after
1989 illustrates the great persistence of the collective imaginary,
bringing to the surface apprehensions, phobias and fantasies that
are as alive today as they were half a century ago.

3
The sense of the Romanian căminul,
with itsconnotations
of home and family, is even more ironic. Trans.
note

4
See the famous manifesto-preface by Mircea
Nedelciu, the other great intellectual figure among the eighties
generation of prose writers, to his novel Tratament
fabulatoriu.

About this issue

This July, The Observer Translation Project leaves its usual format to present a special CRISIS ISSUE. Things are tough all over. Hard Times suddenly feels like the book of the moment. The global economic crisis impacts life as we know it, and viewed from Bucharest the effects reverberate in domains that include geo-politics and publishing in Romania and abroad, with the crisis at The Observer Translation Project as an instance of a universal phenomenon.
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